Blood Morning
by Trust No One
Summary: The morning Achilles fights Hector, the Greek hero ponders on his past choices, his unexpected love for Briseis and the duty he has to avenge Patroclus’ death. FINAL CHAPTER!
1. Patroclus Fire

Blood Morning

By Trust No One

Category: Angst

Rating: PG

Summary: The morning Achilles fights Hector, the Greek hero ponders on his past choices, his unexpected love for Briseis and the duty he has to avenge Patroclus' death. Three-part movie-verse.

Disclaimer: Characters and places belong to Homer and WarnerBros. No copyright infringement intended.

1. Patroclus - Fire

As dawn breaks, I'm still standing by your pyre. By now, there is little left of it, and of you, save for the pungent smell of smoke and charred flesh. It drowns out the sea breeze slithering through my hair and covering it in ashes. Your ashes, caressing my face. The shells of the necklace you wore are cutting into my palm but I feel nothing. I look at it and a distant memory stirs within me: in another world, in another time, my mother made us twin necklaces, as a going away present. I never wore mine and I left it behind, because her memory will not be sealed in a thing that hangs about my neck. Her memory lingers in the open sea, in the salty smell that gathers on my skin in delight each morning.

Just as your memory, my most devoted of friends, claws at the remains of my sanity, begging for forgiveness. Yet I do not want to hear the plea borne upon the winds that scatter your ashes further away from the world of the living. What I want to hear is an entreaty to avenge you. But I know you better than that. You would not want me to ride out to the gates of Troy this morning, lusting for Hector's blood in revenge for your death. It was all a mistake; such as we mortals make all the time. It was unfortunate and cruel, but it happened. And as much as your shadow, freshly arrived in Hades, would want to reach out and prevent me from doing what I must, it cannot stop me. You came full circle and left this world gloriously, as any warrior would want: dying in honorable combat, at the hand of a worthy opponent.

Ever since I can remember, I have always wanted to protect you. I remember us swimming together in the sea, and you were such a strong swimmer. You would say that if wars were fought at sea, in the water, the measure of the great Achilles would be how well Patroclus had taught him to dive and plunge. And I would laugh and try to overpower you, finally succeeding in pushing you under, but you would elude me every time, slippery like a fish, and come up laughing after long moments underwater. I never told you, but I worried for you. You would dive and sometimes I searched the depths of the limpid waters only to lose sight of you moments after you submerged. You went looking for rare shells and bring them to my mother so that she could make her necklaces for us. But more often than not, I found myself holding my breath until you surfaced again. Often enough I pictured myself having to rescue you, because you had got tangled in weed or rocks at the bottom in spite of you being the better diver. How ironic that the sea you loved so much brought you to the place where you would die.

I feared not for my own death, but how I feared for yours! If I could shield you a moment longer from the inevitable, then I cared not for the hurt you felt. The pain was there, in that wounded and accusing stare you gave me when I told you to man the ship and I strutted off to take the beach of Troy. Was it then that the plan of stealing my weapons and armor began to sprout in your mind? Could it have been payback for my lack of trust in you? Or was it the only way you could think of protecting me?

I wish I could hold you and tell you how sorry I was. That I would have rather died a thousand deaths than see you in harm's way. Then maybe you would have understood that all I wanted was to shield you. But I had to belittle you, because I just didn't know any better. Not once did it cross my mind that you would rise to an occasion I myself refused to meet. And when they told me you were dead, do you know what it was that I first felt? Rage. At you. For turning against my wishes and for refusing to do as I said. Was death your punishment? Gods forgive me, for I wanted to believe that as chaos took hold of my mind and waged war against the little reason left in me.

But who was I to ordain your chosen path in life? In my folly and blindness, I never saw it. Not for a moment did I doubt that you would submit unconditionally to my experience and judgment. I never cared enough to understand that you believed in everything I stood for, even if I never did. That your reason for living and dying was just as compelling as it was for the Trojans to defend their city. You alone understood what my presence meant to the morale of the Greek army and you acted on it when I chose to abandon them over an inane squabble. In believing that I was punishing Agamemnon, I was in fact costing thousands of Greek soldiers their lives. And this time I did not even have to lift my sword to do it. At the time you raced into battle, with little or no thought to your own life, I looked the other way, because I never cared enough. I had no loyalty other than myself. The friendship and devotion that I professed towards you was a lie.

Was it terrible living in my shadow, brother? Was it hard for you to keep it all to yourself, knowing each day what a hollow and pointless existence I led? Did it tear you up inside to be always the one left behind? Somehow I do not think so. For in your quiet wisdom, you saw me for what I really was; yet your loyalty never wavered. You respected my decisions, lamentable as they might have been, and decided to take the only course of action you could: fight this battle for me. You never wished to spite me, like I so foolishly believed at first. It was simply the only thing you could do. Had it not been for you, Hector's army would have claimed victory and the Greeks would have suffered irreparable damage.

There is one more thing to do and then it will be done. You, of all people, should understand why I must do this. But if I listen hard enough, your voice carries through the stillness of dawn and it mourns, in rhythm with the waves, for it cannot change my decision.

To be continued


	2. Briseis Earth

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2. Briseis - Earth

Even as I stand before my tent, I know that you are not inside. You cannot bear to be here, watching me prepare to do battle with your cousin. My legs dig into the sand, and I wish I could root my whole being in the beach of Troy, a place that I would gladly make my home, if only I could forsake this madness.

With little hope, I glance around for you in the half-born light, and for a moment there is nothing more I wish than to find words convincing enough to explain why I have to seek revenge against Hector. But you would never want to come close to understanding it.

You are so much wiser than I will ever be.

We built our dream world on sand, Briseis, and even before they told me Patroclus was dead you knew that. My arm, out of a will of its own, shot out and wrapped itself around your neck in inhuman wrath. How limp you went and how terror spread across your features in an instant. But you said nothing because you understood that our time together had come to an abrupt end. We were enemies once more and the world outside had crashed on us with the force of the gods' punishment.

I screamed denial and rage because I refused to face the truth. And that because of the choices I had made, Patroclus lay dead.  It was me who had decided to leave the war and take the path I never thought I would tread. I thought nothing of sacrificing my reputation as a warrior and everything that I'd ever stood for, to have a chance at the other life that I'd only just glimpsed. I was beginning to understand how meaningless my existence had been up to that point and how many amends I needed to make in order to please this new self that was slowly awakening in me. The feeling that it was all worth it - that _you_ made it all worth it - never left me while I was with you and for the first time in my life I believed in what I was doing.  _Let someone else fight for glory and immortality, I told myself. I choose life, however fleeting and imperfect it may be._

Yesterday, I thought it all possible. The early morning battle did not even cause me to stir. Let Hector drive the Greeks back to their ships, burn them all down if he so pleased, teach the invaders the lesson they so direly needed. It was no longer my fight. For in my arms I held you - my future - and I would have forsaken my past and all the immortality in the world for it.

But now I know better: Apollo's revenge was sweet indeed. The Sun god exacted a just punishment on the mortal who dared to desecrate his statue. Striking me down would have been quick and painless. Instead he chose to mete out his punishment by granting me one great love and a few hours of happiness, only to tear them away from me when I had just begun to taste them.

I had sailed across the Aegean to fight a war that wasn't mine. Instead I had found _you_ and for the length of time we spent together, I believed that I was given a choice by the gods. Much the same way, I trusted that the warrior that had inhabited my body thus far would slowly retreat to give way to a new man. For a few days, I almost believed it. I say almost because the sounds of battle and dying were never too far away. They rang on the battlefield in the day or drummed incessantly in my ears at night. Yet steadily, being close to you managed to drown out most of the clamor. I had not told anyone before, but in the long hours of sleeplessness, the sounds of the dying, their screams and curses, all directed at me, haunted me constantly. They made me afraid of what may await me in Hades. I was not afraid of dying, only of what might happen afterwards…

Odysseus said that women had a way of complicating things, but he was wrong. I thought life was simple enough before I met you: take life in battle and live to fight another day. But it proved simpler still when the shadows of the men I had killed slowly dissipated and my vision was filled with images of how my life could be with you. And it seemed like nothing had ever been clearer or less complicated. That I did not fully understand it did not daunt me. Could there be forgiveness for the lives I'd taken? Or even respite from the life I had not really chosen to live except by being born? Even now I ask myself what it was that made me look inside my soul and wish, like I had never wished anything before in my life, to see someone else. Of course I was furious with myself at first. No woman had remotely made me feel inadequate. I had been called all manner of names, be it dumb or brute or divine or hero. Yet no one before you had asked me if I the life I led was my own choice. I wanted to show you that I wasn't like that, in the beginning. But after that first night, and the following day, I began to realize how little that mattered to you and that much as I wanted, my past could not be changed. And the thought started creeping into my mind that maybe, just maybe, I could shape my future. Into something that would become _our_ future.

I would have persuaded you to leave Troy with me. I know it. And you would have come with me, knowing that my absence was all your countrymen needed to drive the invaders away from Troy. But most of all, you would have come with me because you had given up your whole life as you knew it, your vows of virginity, your family and homeland only to love me. And who was I to turn away from that most precious of gifts?

To be continued


	3. Hector Steel

3. Hector - Steel

You took it all away from me, Prince of Troy. One swing of your blade was enough to take Patroclus' life, Briseis' love and my own hopes for the future. It was all it took to bind me in merciless shackles of loss and vengeance. For how would Patroclus' shadow find rest in Hades, knowing that I did not honor his memory enough to avenge him? How would Briseis lie with me again, speaking words that a priestess of Apollo was never meant to utter to a man, after I've slain her beloved cousin?

Fragments of cherished moments spent with Patroclus and Briseis flash before my eyes and it seems enough for my rage to soar high into the heavens. But it isn't. For all the grief you've caused me, Hector, I feel nothing.

I cannot kill you enough times for what you've done to me. Yet try as I might, I cannot find it in the core of my being to hate you as passionately as I crave.

This hollow inside eats away at me like a disease. I need to feel hate, fear, remorse, passion – anything. I will myself to hate you just enough to fuel my battle-lust, yet all that grows within me is an even greater void. I would give my life this moment for the ability to cry for the anguish I don't feel. For the lives of thousands that I've run through with my blade and the ones I condemned to mourning. Because I begin to understand how they felt, or rather how having everything dear taken away from them robbed them of feeling, leaving them to roam the earth bereft of purpose and forced to carry on with a life that no longer held meaning. Maybe in the end I would even feel enough remorse for your own family who will be mourning your death by the end of today. But I know that, above all, I need your blood, as if to try and convince myself that killing you will make it all better or that my pathetic self-pity could become emotion.

I would even be willing to trade places with you this morning, if only to feel whatever emotion is tearing you apart. Even if it is helplessness and rage at facing the ruin of your world, watching your family eaten away by worry and the knowledge that you alone bear a burden far greater than all of them. Do you ask yourself who will bear that burden once you are gone? Surely, you must, and surely you look around in vain seeking the one who would be worthy enough to take your place.

The sight of my armor and weapons, ready and waiting inside the tent, sickens me like never before. My beautifully crafted shield catches what little light there is and mocks me with its splendor. I look at it as if seeing it for the first, or the last time. It is adorned with the stars and the moon and two great cities: one celebrating a wedding, the other one at war. I run my hand along its edge and will myself to touch it like I would have days before: as if it were a lover and a protector. Only days before, it would have felt my reverence and filled me with its power. But not this morning. I'm sorry, old friend, I want to say. But I cannot and the words choke in my throat. From now on, my weapons are no longer extensions of my body, but mere killing implements.

The sun has barely risen as I step outside and look around to see nothing but the grey, frightened faces of my Myrmidons. The blur of madness clears a little from my eyes yet my vision is still tinged with a shadow that hangs about me like a shroud. My men watch in awe and silence, most of them lowering their eyes as they meet mine. They know me well yet they have never seen me quite like this, I'll wager. And I know that they are afraid of me, rather than for me.

What would they say if they knew that I did not feel victorious, as I will undoubtedly return, but afraid of facing life afterwards? How can I tell them that you, Hector, will be indeed better off in Hades, amongst the greatest heroes, while I will be wandering the Earth looking for something I can never again find?

Without the shadow of a doubt, I know the outcome of our battle. The warrior part of me is not riding out to the gates of Troy to fight you, but to obliterate you. Yet the other side of me, the _other_ Achilles, who could live in peace and maybe even raise a family, will most certainly die with you. The part of me that was naïve enough to believe that perhaps there was another chance to make amends will be crushed to dust as if it never existed.

Whatever is happening to me now, I deserved it. The thousands I've killed can have their vengeance for they shall see me walk this earth alive and consumed by the horror I alone lovingly crafted with my own two hands. A just punishment, they would say.

Of course, I could turn away and flee, take Briseis with me and forget this war, my vow of vengeance and all this madness, but I cannot. The wind shrieks through the slits of my helmet and makes my eyes water, as I would like to believe. I leave the sun behind as I ride out towards the gates of Troy, deaf to Briseis' tearful pleas.

The thought of Hades does not daunt me as it had moments ago. For I have begun to die a little from the moment they brought the news of Patroclus' death. I do not wish to do this more than you probably wish to leave your loved ones behind. Yet we both must abide by what honor dictates. We are fools, of course, yet the knowledge is not enough to stop us. We are nothing more than miserable instruments of fate.

Damn you to Tartarus, Prince of Troy, for forcing me into this position. And because I cannot blame you for defending your country or for believing you were fighting me yesterday.

Damn you, because hating you is all that I have left.

The End


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